This summer, in New York, the price of coffee fell to its lowest level since November 2024. Analysts talk about a surplus, a record harvest in Brazil — nearly 72 million bags — and a price that could slide toward two dollars a pound. In Brussels, between the flame and the wind, we felt none of it. Because small-batch coffee isn't bought on the exchange. It's bought by hand. Bag after bag. Weekend after weekend.
The market panics. Golden breathes the same.
The exchange is a machine built for millions of bags. Frost in Brazil two years ago, drought in Vietnam, then a giant harvest and a surplus estimated at 7 to 10 million bags for the coming season. The numbers race across screens, and the price climbs and falls like a thermometer gone mad.
Golden, our roaster, doesn't read screens. He reads the sky. When the metal heats up on Saturday morning at the market, the only variable that matters is the weather of that day — not a graph from New York. He stands there in the open air, in full view, between fire and sparks.
Why small-batch coffee doesn't shake like the market
The big players buy long, stockpile tonnes, bet on the price. We do the exact opposite: little at a time, only what we roast on the weekend. No full warehouse, no wager.
The result: the price of your bag doesn't hang on the panic of world markets. It hangs on a jute sack bought honestly and a morning when Golden stood beside the fire. That's all.
What "small" actually means
Not tonnes. A few sacks per weekend. A lot of Brazil Cerrado roasted in a single June day never comes back — we told it exactly like that, with its date and its weather, in the Cerrado lot of 27 June. When it's gone, it's gone. This isn't scarcity marketing. It's simply what a small batch is: it has a beginning and an end.
July at Marché de l'Abattoir
It's a heatwave. The air sits heavy over Anderlecht, and the beans give way fast on the hot metal — light, open, almost floral notes. Summer coffee is nothing like winter coffee. Want to taste what the sky writes each month without committing to one bag? Our Meteo Discovery Box lets you follow the weather cup by cup.
The city hosted the coffee world. We still roast on Saturdays.
In June, Brussels welcomed World of Coffee — 13,000 professionals from more than 160 countries, Europe's biggest coffee trade show, at Brussels Expo. The whole world came to talk about the future of coffee a few kilometres from us.
We didn't have a stand. We had fire, smoke and the market. While the industry gathered under one roof, we did what we always do: roast in the open air, in plain sight, with the wind fighting the flame. Two worlds in the same city. One measures coffee in millions of bags. The other in mornings. If you want to understand why a single-origin Brazil tastes so different from one weekend to the next, it starts here.
Small batches go fast — those who know, know: check what's left on meteokoffie.com. And on Saturday and Sunday we're still there, at the Marché de l'Abattoir, exit of the Manufakture car park, in Anderlecht. This weekend's sky won't come back.
Brut. Sauvage. Imprévisible.
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